Setting up a Billing Alarm

A handy alarm#

In this lesson, we’re going to create a billing alarm to get a notification when you are expected to reach or have reached a certain threshold. We will set a dollar value like five or ten dollars, and if we reach or are expected to reach that amount, we will get an email alert to let us know.

If you follow the instructions given in this course, you’ll be terminating your instances and the leasing objects — which might otherwise cost you money — to make sure that you stay within the free tier. You should also read up on what’s included in the free tier and make sure you’re aware of what you should do to make sure you don’t get any bills. But just in case, we’re going to set up the billing alarm.

You need to log in to the root account to do this because only the root account has access to modifying billing information.

Log in to the management console as the root account.

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Go up here where we've got the name of our account and choose the down arrow. Then, we go to "My Billing Dashboard".

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Then go down to "Billing preferences" and click it.

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What you'll need to enable is "Receive Free Tier Usage Alerts" and "Receive Billing Alerts". You need to put in the email address that you want these to be sent to. You can then choose "Save preferences" and you will now receive free tier usage alerts to the email address that we specified.

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We also want to receive billing alerts when we reach a certain threshold in a dollar value. So for that, choose "Manage Billing Alerts".

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It opens up the monitoring tool called Cloudwatch and in Cloudwatch we go down to "Billing" which is under "Alarms".

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We then choose "Create alarm".

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It loads the metrics for us. The metric name is "EstimatedCharges" and the currency is US dollars. What we need to do now is to scroll down.

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Specify the amount, in this case, I'm going to set mine to 10 dollars. You can then choose next.

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Cloudwatch will create an SNS topic. SNS stands for the Simple Notification Service and is one of the AWS services that send messages to you. You can then choose "Create new topic".

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Cloudwatch will create an SNS topic. SNS stands for the Simple Notification Service and is one of the AWS services that send messages to you. You can then choose "Create new topic".

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We can then choose "BillingAlert" as the name and we can choose next.

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We then get a summary of the information and we can just choose "Create alarm" and that's it.

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We've now created our alarm but we get a message which tells us that we need to confirm the subscription in SNS. We can choose the option "View SNS Subscriptions" and it will take us over to the simple notification services console.

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You can now see there's a pending confirmation here. You need to go to the email address that you used and you should find an email from Amazon. Choose to confirm subscription and you should then get a message saying subscription confirmed.

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If we head back to the console and refresh this page we should now see that our subscription has been confirmed and that's it.

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A handy alarm#

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